That three-year time leap has given season two of NBC’s Quantum Leap a remarkable creative boost. In just a few short weeks, the hit series starring Raymond Lee as Dr. Ben Song, a scientist at the helm of a revived version of the original Quantum Leap project, has given audiences a lot to ponder. First, we discovered our favorite team disbanded after the Quantum Leap project folded in the aftermath of Ben’s (Raymond Lee) disappearance. It quickly reassembled though.

Then came the big twist: Ben’s fiancé Addison (Caitlin Bassett) thought he had vanished for good. Now she’s seeing an army officer (Yellowjackets’ Peter Gadiot). Other recent highlights found Ben landing in the body of an 18-year-old working for his father’s shoe store in Koreatown in Los Angeles at the start of the explosive 1992 riots.

Overall, the reimagined series based off the 1990s NBC sci-fi show has become one of the week’s inspiring gems. Executive producer Dean Georgaris and showrunner Martin Gero chatted up the direction of season two and teased more surprises ahead in this excerpt from our MovieWeb video interview.

Thinking Ahead and Quantum Leaping Back
Quantum Leap (2022) Release Date September 19, 2022 Cast Raymond Lee, Mason Alexander Park, Caitlin Bassett, Eliza Taylor, Peter Gadiot, Ernie Hudson Main Genre Sci-Fi Seasons 2
Fans of the original Quantum Leap, which starred Scott Bakula and Dean Stockwell, have embraced the new series, once again featuring the lead character leaping from life to life, righting things that went wrong. Season one ended with Ben leaping back into his own body. But the future seemed uncertain with regard to how these characters’ lives would play out.

In addition to Ryamond Lee and Caitlin Bassett, the series also stars Ernie Hudson as Herbert “Magic” Williams, a career military man, and Ian Wright (Mason Alexander Park), who runs the AI unit “Ziggy.” Jenn Chu stars as Nanrisa Lee, who oversees digital security for the project.

As for the three-year time jump this season, Dean Georgaris says it was necessary for several reasons:

“In the first season, it was an unusual situation that Martin and I inherited the basic mythology, because we came in the middle of the first episode. Season one was essentially a mystery thriller — why did Ben leave? And I think that was very successful, but we were fortunate enough to get an early pick-up, and that allowed us to do a lot of thinking about what we would do with season two.”

NBC

Right at the top of the creative list was the desire to shift from the show being a thriller heavy on plot in between cuts back to the HQ to telling character stories. “We have an incredible cast,” Georgaris added. “We wanted the stories in the present to be more emotional and less time travel oriented. What the time leap did for us, essentially, in an instant, was that all the characters in the headquarters had experienced profound failure, profound loss, and gone through something. The audience doesn’t necessarily know what they went through. Some things we reveal very quickly. Addison is heartbroken [over Ben] and she moved on.”

Other things, he said, played out a little longer, but it gave them a second season filled with emotion. “And it was Martin’s idea. I remember when he first said it to me casually, like, ‘Is this a crazy idea?’ And the entire room was just like, ‘That’s the best idea we’ll possibly have for season two.’ So, it’s all credit to Martin.”

Related: Quantum Leap: How the Reboot Stacks Up Against the Original Series

Shooting Seasons One and Two Back-to-Back
NBC

The duo said they shot seasons one and two back-to-back because the SAG-AFTRA strike was looming on the horizon. To that end, they opted to travel and shoot as much as they could in various locations specific to upcoming stories. Egypt was one of those locations, and the duo didn’t want to use a green screen for that.

“Look,” Martin Gero shared, “we’re kind of anti-green screen. One of the incredible benefits of shooting in Los Angeles is that it’s a city built to give a lot of different looks for TV shows. We’ve been incredibly lucky to go to not only a lot of standing sets, but a lot of phenomenal locations like you saw in the season premiere. [That locale] was an hour outside L.A. and it looks like Siberia.”

But at a certain point, even Los Angeles runs out of looks, which sparked some ideas on how to broaden the scenic landscape, literally. “One of the incredible things we were able to do is something called blindspot — shooting in 16 different countries,” Gero went on to explain.

“We figured out a way to do it that is affordable. To be able to have Ben at the foot of the actual Sphinx, closer than you can get to it if you were just a regular tourist. To be among the pyramids of Giza, to have a chase through this incredible mosque, I mean… it’s just an incredible episode. It has incredible scope, and so, for us, the fun of the show is the leaps, is being transported into different eras and different locations. We just wanted to broaden the scope of what that can be, you know, and Egypt was one of the solutions.”

“That’s the fun of producing a TV show, and it’s why writers are in charge, right?” Dean Georgaris added. “Because we can say, ‘Okay, we’re going to go to Egypt,’ and with enough time to then write an episode that fits in to what we can do. It’s not like we write an episode that takes place in Egypt and then figure out how to do it. It’s kind of a cart before the horse type of thing where we’re like, ‘Okay, we want to go somewhere great, and we had to choose places […] that couldn’t feel modern. We had to find sections of Cairo that still feel untouched since the ‘60s.”

Related: 20 of the Best Science Fiction TV Shows of All Time, Ranked

On Eliza Taylor’s Character
NBC

One of the biggest eyebrow-raisers this season may revolve around Eliza Taylor’s character, Hannah. Martin Gero explained that the character is not a time traveler, saying, “She’s not some sort of hologram and she’s not a sci-fi construct. She’s a regular person who just happens to have an incredible and potentially coincidental connection with Ben.” He added:

The hard part about the show is when you have a great guest star that has a great connection with Ben, you’ll never see them again. Like it’s impossible to have recurring guest stars in the past. And I think we’ve figured out how to have a recurring guest star in the past with none other than the illustrious and luminous Eliza Taylor.

Leaping off that point, Dean Georgaris was quick to point out that in season two, the showrunners were looking for ways to expand not just what the Quantum Leap universe is, but really the way people think about it. “Like, why does the quantum accelerator work?” he noted. “And what does it mean to be a time traveler? I think every choice we’ve made, including the casting of Eliza and the characters Hannah and Tom [Peter Gadiot] and what we’ve done with the series regulars is to expand and potentially surprise the audience.

“And,” he added, “to make them think about the Quantum Leap programming in ways they might not have thought of. Mostly because of the limitations of the first show in terms of the number of characters, and the limitations of our first season in terms of its focus as a thriller.”

Those limitations seem to be gone, as season two is truly boundless. Catch Quantum Leap Wednesdays on NBC and stream it on Peacock.

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